I had a major fight with my boss the other day and I found myself involuntarily switching into English although she's a Chinese as much as I am. (But she's also a foreign company trained senior employee, or manager, more than I am).
In the MNCs circle of Shanghai, people do speak a lot of English even when there's no foreigner present. Mostly because there're many professional terms that are better expressed in English and mutually understood in office or even out of office communication. E.g. in marketing we talk a lot about "positioning", "consumer insight", "consumer communication" - all these terms sounds quite lame when translated into Chinese, while other terms such as "value proposition" just defy any attempt for translation.
To me, the most ingenious expression of a concept come from its original language, and translations into other languages often seem inadequate, esp. if these languages are not linguistically related.
Hence, all the business language - esp. MNCs terms are better expressed in English.
And not only business contents, culture contents too. Many of us would rather watch "Sex and City", or "Boston Legal" with English subtitles instead of Chinese.
And it's not just that. A few years ago, I found myself doing inner dialog more and more in English and I started to realize that this is perhaps a psychological topic, this is about identity, coz language is such an essential, almost fundamental element of identity. When you choose an identity, you need to identify a language. Like Rap is the language of what, I don't know, youth rebellion?
I grew up in an out-flung province in the southwest of China and I grew up speaking the local dialect. My home country is most known in the past for its tobacco industry, its minority people and wild landscapes (it is known today for tourism), even though the city I grew up is a city like any other city, when I went to university in a central province, I often got asked "do you have elephants and peacock walking on the streets?" I was invariably furious whenever I was asked so. (It didn't hit me until many years later that perhaps the boys were just trying to strike up a conversation, trying to be fun, or even trying to flirt!). So when I went to university, I switched myself into Mandarin. And even when I went back to my hometown nowadays, I prefer to stick to Mandarin instead of re-adapting my old dialect because speaking my old dialect makes me feeling retracing the years of growing up and went back into my old self - the shy, clumsy child and teenager I once was. So I shed my local dialect like an old cocoon and I'm now my Mandarin speaking self, university-educated, self-awared, confident big girl - until I became Fortune 500-tint, English speaking marketing professional, highly educated, well paid, well exposed and almost worldly.
My colleagues have observed that I actually do presentation better in English than in Chinese, technically it's because when I speak Chinese, I speak too fast that sometimes I could stumble over myself. While in English, I have better control of pace. Also, while I'm perpetually mild and pleasant in Chinese, I'm more passionate talking about creative ideas in English, more decisive phrasing out my strategy. In the social context, I'm still shy in Chinese, but could be a lot more open in English. In sum, English is the building material I use to create my desired self. And when it comes to negative content, like fighting, like cursing, English could provide a buffer too. At one point during our fight, my boss said "we were always like this (push our agencies to the edge) when we were at XX company", and I found myself blunting out "in XX company, you had tons of money, you can fuck your Agency bad". See, I can not say "fuck" in Chinese, but I don't seem to have a problem saying it in English.
So, I'm good with my English, I feel quite at home with it now. And now I'm learning German, I wonder would it bring me another identity? Perhaps more split of personality than I already am?
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